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UPSTATE WASTE SITE MAY ENDANGER LIVES

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NIAGARA FALLS, N.Y., Aug. 1—Twenty‐five years after the Hooker Chemical Company stopped using the Love Canal here as an industrial dump, 82 different compounds, 11 of them suspected carcinogens, have begun percolat- ing upward through the soil, their drum containers rotting and leeching their contents into the backyards and basements of 100 homes and a public school built on the banks of the canal.

Children and dogs have received chemical burns playing on the canal site, and large numbers of miscarriages and birth defects have been found among residents of the homes along the site.

Tomorrow, the State Health Department is scheduled to recommend whether the Governor should declare a health emergency and evacuate the area's families with small children.

The canal, dug in the 1890's to provide power and water for a model‐city scheme, was used as a toxic‐waste dump by the Hooker Chemical Company from 1947 to 1952. Thousands of drums were dropped directly into the receding water or buried in its banks.

In 1976, after six years of abnormally heavy rains, the canal “overflowed its underground banks,” residents say, and the stuff began surfacing — an incredible mixture of 82 industrial chemicals so far, 11 of them suspected carcinogens, according to the Federal Enyironmenal Protection Agency..

Children and dogs hive been burned playing in the ‘fields, visitors have had the soles of their shoes corroded through, and some backyard trees have been completely gnawed away by chemical action.

It has also begun seeping through basement walls, and air monitors placed by the Federal agency have counted levels of from 250 to 5,000 times as high as is safe for some chemicals in some homes.

The State Health Department ran blood test and epidemiological histories on residents of 97th and 99th Street between Frontier Avenue and Colvin Boulevard about 100 families.

Preliminary figures counted four children with birth defects among 24 in the southern block of the stretch; all of them mentally retarded, one mother said. It also showed a miscarriage rate of 29.4 percent. Thus far the department has refused to draw conclusions from these figures because the statistical sample is vpry cmall

A Case in Point

Residents say many in the neighborhood have died of rectal, breast and blood cancers, and the Health Department has said it plans to make a study going as far back as 20 years to test the truth of this. Many residents said their dogs had died of tumors or distemper before they reached the age of 3.

Karen Schroeder, one of whose four children was born with a cleft palate, an extra row of teeth and slight retardation, grew up at 476 99th Street, and now lives at 460. Her protest to The Niagara Falls Gazette and Representative John LaFalce, Democrat of Tonawanda, first raised official concern for the neighborhood.

Her backyard seems to be the lowest draining point for the waters leeching out of the fill. Her swimming pool was popped out of the ground by the rising water table, her whole garden killed. The redwood posts of her backyard fence eaten away, and local authorities pumped 17,500 gallons of chemical filled water out of her yard in two days this year, water that even Chemtrol, the county's biggest waste disposal company, refused to handle, she said. So it was trucked, to Ohio and poured down a deepwell disposal site.

Her dog died young and now her husband, Timothy, jokes that their daughter's Easter rabbit has become their miner's canary. “If it dies, we'll know to move away.”

Asked to Repeat Tests

She and 90 other neighors have been asked to repeat their state blood tests because of “abnormalities” that were found. A State Health Department spokesman identified them as liver abnormalities, but said it might be a laboratory problem.

Mrs. Schroeder said she had heard they found a high white blood count in her and in her mother, Aileen Voorhees, who is the neighborhood record‐holder for chemicals detected in basement air: 12,835 micrograms per cubic meter.

“Do you want to see the paper of what's coming through my wall?” Mrs. Voorhees asked yesterday, handing over a sheet sent her by the E.P.A. to translate blips that had come over on the air monitoring machine installed on a big basement workbench. The elements included chloroform, benzene, trichloroethene, toluene, petrachloroethene, 1,3,5,trichlorobenzene —high amounts of nine of the 11 it could test for — at least two of them carcinogenic.

The homeowners who bought land next to the canal did so because they had been told it would be turned into a park and be near the school, Mrs. Voorhees said.

‘Ticking Time Bombs’

“They didn't let anybody know it was dangerous,” she said. “They didn't know how far the stupid chemicals were going to run.”

The Love Canal site is one of 38 known industrial waste landfills in Niagara County, and probably the most serious health hazard of the thousands in the na- tion, Eckhardt C. Beck, regional director for the E.P.A. said.

“We've been burying these things like ticking time bombs — they'll all leech out in 100 or 100,000 years,” he said. “We're mortgaging our future if we don't control them more carefully. And the bottom line is who's going to pay to clean this thing up?

The Hooker Company, which has offered to share the cleanup costs of a tentative city plan to dig tiled drainage ditches along the sides of the canal, has had no comment throughout the controversy. ‘

A spokesman at the company's Houston headquarters, Sandie Kroeger, said the president, Donald Baeder, could not be reached yesterday.

No lawsuits have yet been filed by any party to the dispute, and no culpability has been acknowledged by anyone.

The city apperas to have been uncooperative with neighborhood requests for help and with state and Federal agencies. sioner, Robert P. Whalen ordered the county to fence off and decontaminate the area, cover or remove all the exposed pesticides, and ventilate the homes.

Tax Abatements Denied

The County Health Commissioner, Francis J. Clay, installed $15 supermarket fans in two homes, and put up a fence children still walk through without knocking down.

The city's Tax Assessor has refused to grant any tax abatement on the homes, even though banks now refuse to mortgage them, or lawyers to title them, Mrs. Schroeder said. And she must still pay $1,200 taxes on a home whose market value she says has fallen to zero.

The City Council voted last Thursday to acquiesce to the opinion of its bond counsel they ought not spend any public money on the land since some of the canal site is owned privately, by a school teacher in Pennsylvania who, according to a local reporter, has stopped paying his taxes.

Representative LaFalce's office is investigating whether the Army dumped chemical warfare material into the canal. A retired city bulldozer operator, Frank Ventry, said that he had helped backfill about 18 barrels the Army trucked to the area from what he called a chemical warfare site. The Army has denied any files on such dumping, but told Mr. LaFalce's assistants it was still checking.

“If the Army dumped, we should get Federal aid, damn it,” Mrs. Schroeder said. “If they dumped, let them get their fanny in here and clean it up, too.”

A young man who asked not to be identified who used to swim in the canal as a child, said he had seen the Army dump maerial there three times. Over the years, as dumping continued, the canal's water began to sting like battery acid and boils appeared “the size of silver dollars, he said. “Every kid I knew had them. The Army has talked to lots of them.”

He is 34, and totally disabled with Hodgkin's disease, a lymph cancer. “Two of my friends from then has the same thing — but not the bleeding so much, he said. ‘'My brother has nerve disease. But I got Social Security. I don't want trouble. I don't want help. I don't, want nothing from the Army, from Hooker, from the city, from nobody.”

The New York Times/Aug. 2,1978

Detailed map in upper right shows neigborhood in Niagara Falls where 82 different chemical compounds have been percolating upward through the soil.

The New York Times/Joe Traver

Karen and Thomas Schroeder of Niagara Falls examining part of their bdckyard, in a spot where industrial chemical wastes surfaced after heavy rains.

A version of this archives appears in print on August 2, 1978, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: UPSTATE WASTE SITE MAY ENDANGER LIVES. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe